Two of the biggest Broadway blockbusters of the past decade, The Producers and Rent,are either playing at or headed to a theater near you — a movie theater, that is. USA TODAY theater and music critic Elysa Gardner gave the soundtrack for each new big-screenmusical a spin. Here's how they stack up against the originals:

By Paul Kolnick

Columbia Pictures

'Producers' on Broadway

'Producers' on film

Stars

The Producers: The New Mel Brooks Musical, 2001, Sony, $18.98): Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reintroduce the bumbling showbiz schemers unveiled by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in Brooks' film, and the rest is box-office history. The leading men's giddy chemistry bursts through the CD speakers, as does the delightful rapport enjoyed by co-stars Gary Beach, Roger Bart, Brad Oscar and Cady Huffman.

The Producers (original motion picture soundtrack, 2005, Sony, $18.98): The boys are back, meaning Lane and Broderick, along with Tony Award winner Beach and Bart, recently on Desperate Housewives. Alas, a desire for a slightly higher celeb quotient must have been expressed by at least one person wearing a suit, for Oscar and Huffman have been replaced by Will Ferrell and Uma Thurman.

The score

Though few would claim that The Producers' strongest suit is its creator's melodic genius, Brooks' taut, unabashedly nostalgic and often surprisingly supple tunes offer a refreshing contrast to the witless bombast seeping through too many modern musicals.

Most of the songs remain pretty much the same, though Uma, playing another leggy, Nordic beauty named Ulla, has a less, um, chesty voice than her predecessor.

Surprises

The broadly comic Springtime for Hitler was first heiled  I mean, hailed  in the movie version, but many were taken by how deftly Brooks combined crass humor and tender yearning in numbers such as That Face and Keep It Gay, which on stage ended like a Village People video gone hysterically awry.

Ferrell has refashioned the stirring Third Reich anthem Der Guten Tag Hop-Clop as an earnest, New Agey ballad that sounds like a lost track from Clay Aiken's Christmas CD. It's one of the funniest things that he  Ferrell, that is  has ever done. There's also the spanking new There's Nothing Like a Show on Broadway, an end-title Lane-Broderick duet that's at once gratuitous and hilarious.

Summary

A breath of fresh air, and a barrel of laughs.

A little less bracing than the original at first, but ultimately just as fizzy and funny and fine.

By Joan Marcus via AP

Columbia Pictures

'Rent' on Broadway

'Rent' on film

Stars

Rent (original Broadway cast) (1996, DreamWorks, $32.98): Lean, hungry, twentysomething actor/singers such as Taye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal and Anthony Rapp play the last of the Bohemians  starving artists, junkies, cross-dressers and other self-styled contrarians living in downtown New York when such a place still existed, back in the late '80s.

The late Jonathan Larson's marriage of rock and musical theater  based on the opera La Bohème to boot  has been criticized for combining the worst excesses of both genres. Larson's sweeping, searching tunes may not quite transcend sentimentality, but at their best, they remind us that the bravest artists usually think with their hearts first.

Some numbers sound oddly sanitized. Larson's grand, open-hearted gestures don't invite understatement; when Dawson dances delicately around Pascal on Light My Candle, one longs to hurl a box of matches at the girl and have her get on with it. Or at least have her check out the sexy Menzel's less anemic approach to Over the Moon.

Surprises

The biggest surprise surrounding this Rent was a tragic one: the sudden and untimely death of its creator, who suffered an aortic aneurysm just shy of his 36th birthday and the opening of the show that would finally establish him. Songs such as Seasons of Love and La Vie Bohème carried an infectious urgency that burnished Larson's "No day but today" legend.

Love Heals, a sappy new cast reading of an old bit of treacle not written for the Broadway recording, is for Larson diehards only.

Summary

A big, beautiful, messy valentine to a dying counterculture  splashed across two CDs.

A big, sometimes beautiful, dated valentine to a vaguely remembered counterculture  splashed across two CDs, with requisite "bonus track."